The Dark (A Detective Alice Madison Novel)(83)

“That you did, Counselor,” Madison said.

For a moment it was all right just to stand out there in silence.

“How’s your partner?” Quinn asked after a while.

“He’s . . . he’s getting better. Slowly.”

A text message pinged on Madison’s cell. She read it twice; it was from Spencer. Jerome McMullen could be out on parole in seven days.

“McMullen,” she said to Quinn. “He’s up for parole.”

It meant that the last thing McMullen wanted was for a twenty-five-year-old kidnapping gone wrong to flare up and demolish his chance at freedom; it meant motive.

A burst of laughter from the small sailboat drifted up and died away.





Chapter 37





The rest of the afternoon passed in a blur as the detectives tried to connect Jerome McMullen to the murders and continued the hunt for Peter Conway’s crew. Madison concentrated on finding a connection between Timothy Gilman and the soon-to-be-released convict; she examined records of past convictions, addresses, known acquaintances—everything and anything that makes up the lives we lead, that connect us to the people we know. The fact that Jerome McMullen had a potential motive to want the David Quinn kidnap/murder to disappear forever was absolutely no good to them if they could not prove he had ordered it, paid Gilman to carry it out, and, twenty-five years later, made sure that Peter Conway and his men wiped out anyone still alive who could testify against him.

Madison stood up and reached for her coat: she would nip out and grab a coffee nearby and bring it back to her desk. The detectives’ room was peaceful, as her team had left, and the current shift was out in their daily duty to serve and protect.

Her cell started vibrating.

“Madison,” she said as she shrugged on her coat.

“Are you still in the precinct?”

Kevin Brown. Madison smiled.

“Yup, one of those days. How’s it going, Sarge?”

“Swell,” Brown replied. “If you’re still kicking around in the precinct, do you want to meet at the shooting range?”

“Can think of nothing better.”

“See you there.”

Madison slipped her cell back into her jeans back pocket and gazed out the window. It was pitch-black. Detective Sergeant Brown had called her late enough in the day that she might have already gone home or made other plans, maybe hoping she had, and still he had reached out to her.

Madison had no illusions about the situation: if Brown didn’t get his shooting up to the level required by the examining board, he would have to hand in his badge, and that would be that. He wouldn’t be a civilian on the force; he wouldn’t finish his last ten or however many years pushing papers from one side of his desk to the other. He would be gone. Madison took a deep breath and rubbed her hands over her face. She couldn’t allow that to happen.


The shooting range was quiet and blessedly deserted when Madison and Brown arrived. J. B. Norton, the chief instructor, had already left for the day, and Madison was grateful for that small mercy. Norton was the kindest soul who had ever taught human beings how to shoot one another, but Brown needed privacy.

The cool air whispered through the pipes as Madison lifted her Glock in the Modified Isosceles stance. She aligned the sights—the gun in a comfortable, two-hand grip—and listened to her breathing. At the end of the exhale she squeezed the trigger, and the shot ripped through the silence. She allowed herself two breaths with the weapon lowered and then repeated the sequence. Her six rounds found the center of the target and demolished it.

She wasn’t there to show off, and she almost put one round out of the target’s core on purpose. She turned to Detective Sergeant Kevin Brown, her partner, who was leaning against the wall behind her, who weeks earlier had been her main ally in the war against Harry Salinger and her main support in the small daily battles of a rookie detective in a Homicide unit.

He looked as he always did: a crisp shirt and a smart tie, even his ever-present raincoat folded neatly on a chair nearby. His ginger hair had a touch more gray in it—that was all the change the past few weeks seemed to have brought. Madison knew better, though: the fear of not being allowed to do the one thing you are truly good at would have been overwhelming, like an oil slick that reached into every corner of a person’s thoughts. She understood and didn’t dwell on it, and, thus, they both ignored the actual reason they were meeting at the range and instead talked about the case, about the joys of partnering Detective Chris Kelly, and about the latest from John Cameron’s jail.

This was her second set; she had gone first, then Brown had taken her place, and now that she was done, it was his turn again. Madison watched him and assessed him carefully.